Item - Garden of Madness

(review based on the Spanish translation)

This book is a step backward from the previous one. Once again it is mostly a dungeon-crawl, and while not as disastrous as The Black Pyramid, it's nonetheless not a very good one. The main problem with the book is that there is just one path that leads to your goal, and finding it can be rather frustrating. The castle branches out into several paths, and often you have to go down the same path several times before realizing that all the choices in it lead to failure outcomes. People who complain about House of Hell having dead-end areas will certainly stop doing so after taking a look at Garden of Madness, which is a much more serious case. Making the player explore most of the castle, finding items or information needed to rescue the princess, would have made for a better book. In this case, much of the adventure feels rather wasted, and that is the main cause why I consider it a failure.

On the positive side, the traps and encounters do require logical thought (something almost completely absent from The Black Pyramid). If the player makes the right choices, it’s possible to progress through to the final goal with a minimum of combat, and that is certainly appreciated. However, once you reach the princess, you need to escape the castle, retracing your steps down the same path you used on the way in. This also feels like a waste of time, because mostly you only need to do the same things you did the first time around and you're out. So basically, this book requires you to undertake the same journey twice with almost no added satisfaction.

Overall, this book rates a distant third from books three and one. It's a shame a good series such as this ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Despite serious flaws, I enjoyed very much my exploration of the Kingdom of Delta, and would have liked the chance to have adventures in other parts of Skyfall. As of this writing, however, we only have these four books, too few considering the potential of the setting.

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